Vision Mobile's latest State of the Developer Nation Report notes a new phase in the IoT market and the maturity of the developers who are engaged in it.

In its publication IoT Developer Segmentation 2016 published in June, Vision Mobile reported that 63% of its sample of IoT developers in its survey conducted in October-November 2015 were motivated by self-improvement.

The chart below shows how respondents were distributed over the following eight groups which Vision Mobile uses to characterize IoT developers:

Hobbyists

Moonlighters building their own IoT solutions to learn and to have fun

Explorers

Independent developers gaining experience as a side project to seize on future opportunities

Hunters

Experienced devs building an IoT business, focused on making money from device sales apps or services

Guns forHire

Seasoned Professionals developing IoT solutions on commission

Product

Extenders

Companies using IoT technology to promote or extend non-IoT products

Optimisers

Engineers and systems integrators using IoT to increase organisational efficiency and reduce cost

Data Entrepreneurs

Companies that monetise digital content or data

GoldSeekers

IoT startups aiming to hit gold.

Now we have the results of the survey conducted in April-May 2016, a key finding of which is:

The wave of IoT newcomers is coming to an end.Throughout 2015 roughly half of the IoT developerpopulation were newbies – 57% in our Q2 2015 survey, and47% in Q4 2015 had less than an a year of experience, that proportion dropped to 22% in Q2 2016.

One effect of this increasing maturity is that developers are more likely to target a specific vertical market. According to the June 2016 IoT Developer Segmentation report after two or three years in the field only a small number of developers remain non-committed and this is reflected in the Q2 2016 results which shows in a big drop of non-committed developers - falling from 24% to 18% over the course of a year as shown in this chart:

Vision Mobile's comment is:

Smart Home is not just the biggest IoT vertical in terms of developer interest, with 48% targeting it, but also the fastest growing – up 6 percentage points in the last year.

As we reported last October, Smart Home was already established as the most popular choice of vertical target but was followed in Q2 2015 by Retail. In Q4 2014 Wearables became the runner up choice and while its popularity has dipped a little in percentage terms it persists as the second most popular.

This sounds like another thing to be worried about, if that is, you are worried about AI taking over the world. We might be getting used to AI learning to beat humans at arcade games and even Chess an [ ... ]